Lineage

Karin Wulf is the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of “Vast Early America,” she earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History at William & Mary. She has also taught at American University and Old Dominion University. The author or editor of prize-winning scholarship on gender, family, and politics, she writes regularly for both public and academic audiences about early American history, the humanities, and archives and libraries.

• Introduction: Genealogy as Statecraft 1. Bible, King, and Common Law 2. Vernacular Genealogy 3. Death and the Ancestral Connection 4. The Chroniclers 5. Oceans of Kin 6. Always Mama's Baby 7. Founders on Foundings 8. Lineage in a New Nation Epilogue: Mormons, Indians, and American Ancestries BibliographyIndex

In Lineage, Karin Wulf guides us through the early modern archive of genealogies-the stories and records kept by Kings and commoners, English, African and Indigenous peoples in the Atlantic world, and brings their enduring importance to light-an importance rooted in the connection between family and state interests or, as she so cogently puts it, between emotion and power. The result is a stunning work, beautifully written and meticulously researched, in which the multiple meanings of family are made exceptionally clear. This is a gorgeously rendered work of history that should be read by anyone interested in the American past.